Every organization is trying to reduce waste and enhance productivity with automation pipelines, enhanced IDEs, and DevOps. Be ahead of the curve and make …
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Effective time management is a skill that most successful software engineers have. It will help you advance quickly in your career without having to work long hours at the end of a sprint. Every organization is trying to reduce waste and enhance productivity with automation pipelines, enhanced IDEs, and DevOps. Be ahead of the curve and make your day more productive by avoiding these top 5 time wastes. How many times have you over-complicated a story requirement by thinking about all the ‘what-ifs’? What if the API you’re working on could be designed to integrate into other platforms seamlessly? What if your dashboard could send automatic reports? Resist the urge. Don’t over-engineer it. You shouldn’t spend a lot of time on features that are too ahead in the future. And, more code means more bugs and unnecessary scripts add to application bloat. Understanding your code and adding new features will also be more complex. To avoid this, constantly ask yourself if your code is solving the specific story requirements. Make sure you think through the use cases and the edge cases, but don’t spend weeks on a feature that you could have shipped much faster. If you’re confused about adding a feature that could potentially address an extreme use case, bring it up in the next sprint meeting. You’ll save a lot of time AND you’ll establish yourself as a team player. As a software engineer, you should follow the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle to be more productive. This can be done in two ways: eliminating redundancies in your code or streamlining development processes. Let’s see how to tackle both these scenarios. Setting up a server or even a virtual environment involves writing the same scripts and actions multiple times. You’re to build your 4-tier development architecture with dev, test, stage, and prod environments with nearly the same steps and code. On top of that, managing infrastructure dependencies have become increasingly complex. Not only is it repetitive and boring, but doing it manually also leaves you vulnerable to human errors. Low code platforms have this functionality out of the box with reusable abstraction-based components and visual drag and drop interfaces. Of course, you won’t find one-click solutions for every scenario, but you’ll have the most basic, repeatable ones covered. Automated pipelines will help you build, replicate and scale the code for as many environments as you need. Clearly outline the number of steps you undertake in a development process and think of how you can reduce them. Automation is your friend here. Also, keep an eye out for processes that you end up performing more than two times. You’d benefit from making an automated sequence that can be triggered every time you want to do that task.
